From the John S. Knight Foundation via Medium:
We cracked the Panama Papers with 400 human brains. Can AI help us next time?
A
new partnership between journalists and Stanford machine learning
scientists aims to enhance the investigative reporting process. Here’s
what we learned so far.
As we approach the third anniversary of Panama Papers, the gigantic financial leak that brought down two governments and drilled the biggest hole yet to tax haven secrecy, I often wonder what stories we missed.Panama Papers provided an inspiring example of media collaboration across borders and using open-source technology at the service of reporting. As one of my colleagues put it: “You basically had a gargantuan and messy amount of data in your hands and you used technology to distribute your problem — to make it everybody’s problem.” He was referring to the 400 journalists, including himself, who for more than a year worked together in a virtual newsroom to unravel the mysteries hidden in the trove of documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.Those reporters used open-source data mining technology and graph databases to wrestle 11.5 million documents in dozens of different formats to the ground. Still, the ones doing the great majority of the thinking in that equation were the journalists. Technology helped us organize, index, filter and make the data searchable. Everything else came down to what those 400 brains collectively knew and understood about the characters and the schemes, the straw men, the front companies and the banks that were involved in the secret offshore world.If you think about it, it was still a highly manual and time-consuming process. Reporters had to type their searches one by one in a Google-like platform based on what they knew.
What about what they didn’t know?...
...MORE
Also at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists if you'd rather give them a visit.
And on the commercial side, this sounds like a dandy addition to the competitive intelligence toolbox.
